Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
This study is available via the UK Data Service QualiBank, an online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data collections held at the UK Data Service. This is a qualitative data collection. The School Leavers Study is a collection of essays written by school children from the Isle of Sheppey in 1978. The essays were collected by Ray Pahl as part of his wider ethnographic study of the Island in which he both conducted directly, and oversaw, several studies which focused on the Isle of Sheppey during the period from 1978 to the mid-1980s. The studies were broadly investigating the changing patterns of work; the division of labour, unemployment, deindustrialisation, and the informal economy. Together, his collections build a complex picture of different aspects of Sheppey life. This particular data collection consists of 141 essays written by school pupils, at Pahl’s request. He asked teachers in a comprehensive school on the Isle Of Sheppey to set an essay to all those who were in English lessons about ten days before they were due to leave school. The youngsters were asked to imagine that they were nearing the end of their life, and that something made them think back to the time when they left school. They were then asked to write an account of their life over the next 30 or 40 years. The data offers a unique insight into the hopes and aspirations of young people on the island at the time. The collection was enhanced in 2010 by transcribing the original hand written essays into a digital format and these have been made available in June 2012. The original hand written essays are stored in the Albert Sloman Library Special Collections, University of Essex. In 2009 Dawn Lyon and Graham Crow revisited this collection. They transcribed, coded and analysed this collection of essays as part of their project Living and Working on Sheppey. They also repeated the data collection with school leavers in 2009/2010, as well as conducting a series of oral history interviews with Sheppey residents in order gain a longitudinal perspective of life on the island. Further information on their project is available on the Living and Working on Sheppey website.
Main Topics:
The main topics cover: school leavers; school - work transition; youth; youth employment; youth unemployment; gender; employment; youth opportunities; working class life; apprenticeships; family; marriage; employers; social attitudes.
Purposive selection/case studies
Self-completion
